My old book is called Regola delli cinque ordini d’architectura and has been written by Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola in 1562. He was a famous italian author and architect.
Firstly, I fed alice brain with the Xenotheka libary. Then I could fill in my search interests. So, I wanted to know which famous architects were influenced by the old book and wrote: the ten books in architecture (in english because alice doesn’t unterstand the italian title). My second intention or question was to find someone, who hasn’t the same Idea of vignola and spoke critical about him.
My first research ended up with the famous architect Rem Koolhaas with the book called Elements of architecture. It’s a huge book with 2333 pages. So you could say its definitely bigger than the book of Vignola. It is more detailed and worked out, but still based on this ten books of architecture. Already the the title is similar to vignolas book. The ‘elements’ are meaning a more accurate differentiation of architecture. Koolhaas shows more details and Vignola ‘only’ the fundament of this details. Compared to the timeline, Koolhaas lived hundreds of years later, in a century with definitely more knowledge and many new inventions but the most of the information is still based on vignolas book.
In my second research i found the book ‘The logic of architecture’ written by William J. Witchell. He questioned the idea of vignola; if we need to describe architecture perfectly in a way like vignola or in what ways is it also possible to interpret? William doesn’t mention that this perfect description is wrong but that we could describe architecture in a diffrent way.
To sum up, this task gave me a deeper insight in vignolas live. It was very interesting to compare his work with others which are really supporting vignola. For me, this book is like a piece of puzzle. It shows a part of his sight of fundamental architecture theory. With all the other books and authors i found, it emerges more and more a overall picture. The more books you read and understand the bigger is your puzzle picture and your insight in this architecture universe.